10) Ideas and Ideals

The right hand of anarchy. Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s took an axe to the roots of Britishness. This is not how she saw it, of course. She genuinely believed that she was removing an excrescence on True Britishness. Nice theory, shame about the facts.

Why ‘The Individual’ is a muddled idea. (From one viewpoint, the ‘average individual’ is a bronze-skinned hermaphrodite less than 5 feet tall. That comes from taking your abstractions a few degrees too far. )

Why Trotksy’s politics achieved nothing solid. Noting his clever observation that the Bolshevik / Menshevik split was between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ politics, but is inability to derive useful politics from this. And the interesting similarities and difference between him and Mao.

Behind every Great Man there’s a Great Ape. The odd way in which we became human, and the ancestral features we still retain. Giftedness as a mental abnormality, and closely tied to things we class as maladjustment or madness.

Is Giftedness Tied to Cultural Values? What’s mistaken and what’s useful in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment (a geographic / historic survey of famous names, mostly dead white males.) How he fails to mention evidence that most US creativity comes from recent arrivals, while being fully assimilated appears to depress creativity.

What is Capitalism? Arguing that Britain is not and never has been an entirely capitalist society.